The Mennello Museum of American Art

The Mennello Museum of American Art endeavors to preserve, exhibit, and interpret our outstanding permanent collection of paintings by Earl Cunningham. The Mennello Museum of American Art also seeks to enrich the public through rotating exhibitions, programs, educational initiatives, and publications that celebrate other outstanding traditional and contemporary American art and artists across a diverse range of disciplines and reflect the rich diversity of American art, while making it accessible to all.

Our vision is to be a distinguished and thriving institution that will build on its city base of support through strong board and community relationships resulting in an improved operating environment and a reputation for being a local and national treasure.

Exhibits

AN IRRESISTIBLE URGE TO CREATE: THE MONROE FAMILY COLLECTION OF FLORIDA OUTSIDER ART is the most comprehensive exhibition of Florida Outsider Art brought together for the first time into one travelling exhibition. The passion for Outsider Art runs deep in Florida, where self-taught artists have forged an indelible mark of special attention on the creative landscape of the state. The most comprehensive exhibition of its kind, organized by Boca Raton Museum of Art and traveled to Tampa Museum of Art, the Mennello Museum’s presentation is the final stop through October 16, 2022. This is the first time the three museums have presented this definitive group of artists with an exhibition of this size and scope. Against the odds, many of these artists created obsessively to escape from their worlds that were often full of deep conflict and personal struggle.

OUR COLLECTION: APPRECIATING THE EVERYDAY is an exhibition that considers the intertwining themes of portraiture and the human figure as well as leisure and the everyday in nine early 20th century paintings from the Collection of Mennello Museum of American Art and the Michael A. and Marilyn L. Mennello Foundation. The works in the gallery are by leading figures in two important stylistic movements of early 20th century Art History– American Impressionism and the urban realism of the Ashcan School of art. These are artists’ styles overlapped in time and a loose brushstroke but transected at subject matter, highlighting diverse American experiences, artistic training, mentorships, and locations.

ALICE AYCOCK: WALTZING MATILDA AND TWIN VORTEXES
Grounds for Exhibitions - Inaugural Outdoor Exhibitions Series
The beautiful twin works, Waltzing Matilda and Twin Vortexes were originally part of series of seven sculptures in Aycock’s significant outdoor exhibition on Park Avenue in Manhattan, entitled Park Avenue Paper Chase. Inspired by the wind and the frenetic energy of city life, these two sculptures will remain on display in the garden. References to nature and industry intermingle as viewers walk around each sculpture sensing the whirling, organic shapes made from aluminum and fiberglass.

Aycock has often focused on creating public art installations, from her pioneering early land art in the 1970s, to these current complex objects made of fiberglass and aluminum. Alice Aycock has lived in New York City since 1968. Her work is in a number of collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, LA County Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, and the National Gallery, as well as on view in cities across the United States. She has been included in the prestigious global exhibitions The Venice Biennale, Documenta VI and VIII and the Whitney Biennial.

Participation in Museum Day is open to any tax-exempt or governmental museum or cultural venue on a voluntary basis. Smithsonian magazine encourages museum visitation, but is not responsible for and does not endorse the content of the participating museums and cultural venues, and does not subsidize museums that participate.